A month or two ago, I published a piece called A Unified Theory of Orgasm. In that piece, I talked about my own history, and how long I took to learn how to orgasm. Basically, learning how to orgasm took a long time and a lot of angst. And I’m really glad that I eventually figured it out — and that I have many years of experimentation still ahead of me.

That piece was really well-received, and a lot of people have thanked me for writing it. As always, though, there’s some mixed feedback too. And I’ve been worried about one thing in particular: it seems like a lot of people missed the part in my article where I said that, now that I’ve learned how to have orgasms … orgasms aren’t even my favorite part of sex. It’s a long article, and I can see how people would miss that, but I did say it and I think it’s important.

Specifically, I wrote:

[It may help some people] not to prioritize orgasms. I am not saying orgasms aren’t important; I just don’t want the importance of orgasms to wound you, the way it wounded me. For me, it is helpful to imagine sex as a journey. For me, it helps to focus on having fun throughout, instead of doing what it takes to reach the “goal” of orgasm. If you’re not taking pleasure in the journey — or at least indulging some curiosity — then why keep going? Why not stop and try something else?

Experimenting sexually in an open-ended way has been, for me, the most productive possible attitude. And in fact, once I knew how to make myself come, I discovered that — though it’s helpful to be able to attain that release if I really want to — orgasms aren’t actually my favorite part of sex! There are lots of other things I like better.

It may be ironic that I spent so much time feeling terrible and broken and depressed because I couldn’t figure out how to have orgasms … whereas now I prefer not to focus on them. In fact, I estimate that most of my current sexual encounters don’t include my orgasm, and very few of my most pleasurable sexual encounters have included my orgasm.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t know everything about sex, and there’s a lot that I haven’t experienced. Anything might change. But seriously. The best sex I’ve had in my life has been connective and emotional and, for me personally, has frequently involved intense BDSM. My favorite sex so far? Has also mostly been orgasm-free.

Some people in some sex-related communities have asserted that for maximum amorous power, it’s actually best to limit one’s orgasms, because then the contained sexual energy ends up channeling into a deeper connection with one’s partner. I can see that. For me, another way of thinking about it is that I’m really into being teased — and I’d rather experience hours of being teased without an orgasm, than have a quick encounter that ends in orgasm.

And …. (Oh no, I can already tell this is going to get complicated … but hey, sex is complicated, so I’ll give it a shot.) …. Especially when I’m doing BDSM, it can actually be hot sometimes if I don’t have an orgasm. For example: if I go to sleep so turned on that I can’t dream about anything but my partner, and then I wake up in a damp mess, and then my partner makes my life difficult all morning, it’s pretty awesome. (Although it’s very nice that I know how to give myself orgasms now, because that means that if I’m really feeling overwhelmed by my own sexual energy, I know how to give myself release if I have to. You know, like … if I need to get some work done.)

Aaaaand … here’s the most painful, ridiculous, circular irony of all. Ready? Here goes: now that I’m capable of having orgasms, I’ve found myself occasionally having orgasms only to satisfy my partner. How absurd is that? Plus, I know I’m not alone, because I’ve talked to other women who do the same thing!

I’ve written before that in the past I’ve felt trapped by fake plastic ideas of “what hot girls look like during sex”; I’ve written about how the pressure to “perform” my sexuality can hurt. What has amazed me, as I’ve gotten older, is just how pervasive that pressure can feel with some partners … and how little pressure there is with other partners. The question of how to create a low-pressure environment for sexuality to flourish is big and complicated, so let me just say here that although I’m all about people giving each other orgasms … it’s no good if my partner’s desire to give me an orgasm turns into pressure for me to have an orgasm!

Scarleteen, my favorite sex education site, has a great article about “squirting” orgasms and how some women feel pressured to “squirt” for the sake of the sexual “novelty”. On a similar note, I’ll close this post with an anecdote about a guy I dated a while back who was very focused on giving me orgasms. To his credit, he figured out how to make me come very quickly. But the problem was that — I soon realized — the biggest reason he wanted to make me come was because he wanted to feel like he could. Fundamentally, it wasn’t about my pleasure; it was about him feeling like “the man”.

Let me be clear: he was a great guy, and I was into having sex with him. But it became very obvious to me that if I didn’t have an orgasm every time we had sex, then he would be really bothered. So there were definitely a few encounters where, although I wasn’t especially interested in having an orgasm, I still closed my eyes and flicked through fantasies with a kind of panic … until I managed to kick-start my body into coming. Isn’t that messed up?

One thing I’ve learned, in years of writing about sex and gender, is that anything — anything at all — can be a tool for limiting or stifling sexuality … just as much as it can be a tool for releasing sexuality. Turns out, orgasms are no exception. Even orgasms can become a difficult duty. I’m so glad that I know how to have an orgasm now; for me, that was an important step for my sexuality and my self-esteem. But now that I’ve learned how to do that, I find myself questioning why it’s such an important and destructive issue in the first place!

Sex is a journey. There are so many directions, so many forks in the road, so many stops along the way. There are so many speedbumps and roadblocks, uphills and downhills, free and easy open stretches. Sometimes people stop to rest. Sometimes people double back. Everything is evolving. A lot of people find it most awesome to simply … enjoy the road.

* * *

When I was in my late teens, I had a couple straight lady friends who did this thing where they took a year of chastity … although they had already had a fair amount of sex. It wasn’t that they thought sex was bad. It wasn’t that they especially disliked sex. It wasn’t that they regretted choosing to have sex previously. But these women felt powerfully drawn towards taking a year away from sex, a year where no sex happened in their lives … and I instinctively understood because I felt the same urge. In fact, I came up with the idea of deliberately taking a year of chastity on my own, before I heard that anyone else was doing it.

I’m not telling you this because I want to sound like one of the “cool kids”; I’m not trying to say anything like, “I was into chastity when it was underground!” As it happened, I never actually went through with my chastity urge. But I thought about it a lot, and I thought about the fact that other girls I knew were doing it. We didn’t have backgrounds that one would normally consider anti-sex. We had liberal backgrounds, liberal parents, liberal educations. Why were we so attracted to the idea of taking a year without sex?

I thought about it a lot, and I concluded this: We felt like we didn’t own our sexuality. We felt like our sexuality wasn’t for us. Or at least, that’s how I felt.

Even though on the surface it looked like I was totally in charge of my sexual decisions, there were social pressures and expectations that made me feel overwhelmed and confused. Not always, and not all the time! But enough that there were plenty of times that I just felt like all I wanted to do was stop and be done with it … “take my body back” from a world that seemed intent on constantly telling me how I must look, how I must dress, how I must have sex.

I’ve written about how much easier it was for me to learn how I ought to look and “perform” while having sex, than it was for me to learn what I actually wanted from sex. That, I think, is where the chastity urge came from for me. That, and the way I kept finding myself making out with guys who I had zero interest in because it was “too awkward to say no”. Or the way I didn’t feel like I could decide not to have sex with my boyfriends; not because I didn’t think my boyfriend would listen if I said no, but because his potentially hurt feelings seemed so much more important than my bodily preferences.

So many things about the way I was having sex seemed to have nothing to do with me. And if sex had nothing to do with me … then why was I doing it? I guess I wanted to reassure myself that I could take control of at least one thing: saying no.

Eventually, I got a better handle on my sexual preferences and began to learn how to talk about them. It was a long process, and my sexual journey is far from over (yay!). There were people who showed me what it meant to have a low-pressure sexual relationship; there were people who made it easy for me to talk about sex; and there were other people who made it easy for me to turn them down, sexually, which was just as important.

But one interesting thing during the beginning of my learning process … especially given that I now really emphasize and encourage talking directly about sex … was that I felt like a couple of my boyfriends really, really didn’t want to talk about sex. And while sometimes this was clearly terrible and toxic, sometimes it felt good. It felt safe. I wanted to be sexual, but I also felt so much pressure to be sexual that it sometimes felt like a huge relief to just … “not worry about it.”

In retrospect, though, I think that the “safety” I felt when I didn’t talk about sex with certain partners was a mirage. It was a false safety, sustained by a carefully crafted mutual fiction of the relationship. When we ended up talking about sex later, “giving up that safety” just made the conversation unnecessarily scary and weird. And the independent illusions we each had about our sexual relationship flourished and grew strong within our silence. Those illusions were so much harder to release after months of self-reinforcement than they would have been if we’d dragged them into the light from the beginning!

Occasionally, I wonder how it would have felt if I’d taken that deliberate year of chastity. I wonder which of my early experiences would have changed; I wonder whether a year of chastity would have made me feel more comfortable with my sexuality sooner. I’m very happy with how I feel sexually now. I sometimes feel confused or overwhelmed, but I think I’m okay at handling that and even talking about it. Yet I do wonder how it would have felt to draw such a strong boundary; to say such a strong “No” to the world and its messed-up sexual expectations.

* * *

This piece is included in my awesome collection, The S&M Feminist: Best Of Clarisse Thorn. You can buy The S&M Feminist for Amazon Kindle here or other ebook formats here or in paperback here.

I wanted to support this idea of orgasms not being absolutely necessary to “sex”. As a guy, I often feel as though it is expected that I will come at some point. But I just don’t care much for it much of the time. The hottest sexual encounters I’ve experienced involved no such thing. Coming can be very nice, but it’s not necessary to have fun. It’s especially awkward for me when I top and the bottom asks for me to come and being like: that’s real nice of you but I don’t really want that right now. Beating the crap out of you is plenty fun for me dear.

I had a sex therapist about a year ago. I asked him what he thought were the reasons he believed people had sex and he didn’t include pleasure in his list of reasons. I was perplexed so I asked him “well what about pleasure?” and he then said, “yes some people have sex for “orgasm”. It really is a very odd thing to say that the first and last word when it comes to connecting pleasure to sex is an “orgasm.” I mean really? Where does an educated “sex therapist” get to thinking in that way? I know men who are addicted to strip clubs but obviously they aren’t having orgasms. They aren’t even having sex.

“Beating the crap out of you is plenty fun for me dear.”- That’s funny.

I’ve definitely felt under pressure to achieve orgasm as the man, both culturally and from a partner, but really it’s almost an incidental part of partnered sex, if I aim for it at all. The real pleasures lie elsewhere, and the climax of a scene is rarely an orgasm but something else, depending on the type of scene. I guess that’s why the thought of vanilla sex does nothing for me.

What SnowdropExplodes said. Which is to say: what alex said. (For me, the defining thing is visceral arousal and sensory experience, including taste, haptics and scent; orgasm is variable.) But that kind of resulted from, or came in tandem with, or somehow related to, what Clarisse said:

“I thought about it a lot, and I concluded this: We felt like we didn’t own our sexuality. We felt like our sexuality wasn’t for us. Or at least, that’s how I felt.”

I’ve gone through my own period of the chastity urge, or something like it. The best way to describe it, really, would be that I was still interested in sex, in sensation, in what my body could do, in what I could experience; I just wasn’t all that interested in having sex, sensation or those experiences with other people. Not until I was able to get them redefined and owned on my own terms.

It’s actually been something to which I’ve returned from time to time, which has led me to suspect that it’s actually part of my natural sexual process. Kind of like a way of digesting new experiences into my sense of sexual identity.

I’ve had a number of male partners tell me that they felt like I was one of the better partners they’ve ever had, pressure-wise — that they felt less pressure with me than they ever had before. It’s obvious that many men experience a huge amount of pressure to have orgasms …. A partner recently sent me this comic, which is both relevant and sad.

@Infra — I’ve gone through my own period of the chastity urge, or something like it. … It’s actually been something to which I’ve returned from time to time, which has led me to suspect that it’s actually part of my natural sexual process. Kind of like a way of digesting new experiences into my sense of sexual identity.

Oh, that’s really interesting. I actually went through a no-sex period myself after my somewhat traumatic realization that I was into SM. I hadn’t correlated it with the chastity urge that I describe in this post; I think it’s much more like what you’re talking about … a kind of personal integration period.

Just like the other guys said: the perceived “neccessity” of male(*) orgasm during intercourse can be irritating sometimes for me, too. Maybe the growing number of fans of orgasm-control/denial comes partly from a need to break this expectancy…

Regarding your preference for being teased: I always figured that the possibility of orgasm is part of the appeal of teasing. Do you enjoy the teasing more, now that an orgasm is actually possible, or is this entirely unrelated for you?

@endymion — Huh, I hadn’t thought about it. I think they’re separate. I don’t enjoy teasing more now than I did before. Honestly, the main benefits of figuring out how to achieve orgasm seem to have been (a) peace of mind, (b) the ability to calm myself down if I’m so turned on that I can’t concentrate, and (c) sometimes it helps me sleep. Studies have shown that orgasm wiring can kind of develop more intensity over time, so I’m curious to see if I have more interesting orgasms in the future. I’ve noticed that when I’m getting orgasms regularly, they do seem to be more powerful and fun. But I’d still trade my most powerful orgasm so far for a good S&M encounter in a heartbeat.

If any women are reading this thread who have a physiology like my own, I’m very curious to know what their feelings are on the question.

With the caveat that I might be speaking to something that I’m not really in the position to speak to:

Isn’t the bar for answering this kind of question much higher for women than it is for men? I mean, sure, I can and do encounter resistance, disappointment and so on with regard to my own approach to and preferences for orgasm, and that requires creative (and sometimes convoluted diplomatic) methods of dealing with it. But it isn’t as if there had been a point at which I’d been seen, by other men, as having achieved liberation, self-knowledge or body ownership by having learned to orgasm. At least, not by having the basic kind.

And it isn’t as if I’d be risking that, or running up against everything tied to that, in considering these questions. Much less in giving any answers to them. And I’m not bombarded by media stuff, direct and innuendo, ranging from talk shows to movies to advertisements. There’s no “Big E” to match Overstock.com’s “Big O,” after all. Cialis and Ageless Male commercials notwithstanding.

It strikes me as being a kind of one-way gate: encouragement to liberate yourself by discovering how to orgasm, but then once you do, pressure to remain there, pressure to keep orgasming, to learn how to do it better, more regularly, to always enjoy it, to never stop preferring that experience. As if backing off from it were some kind of relapse — as if multiple orgasm were supposed to become a life-long thing, a permanent state.

And I have to add this: Thank you for repeatedly challenging my view of things in a non-threatening way. Somehow you manage to allow me (and hopefully others) to relate to your experience even though I come from a wildly different angle.

@Infra — Yeah, pressure to be “sexually liberated” is something I think about a lot (as you know). The orgasm thing is just one more facet of it.

@endymion — Thanks, that kind of positive feedback really does mean a lot to me.

Relevant to this topic … a female reader recently posted to my Facebook wall the following comment:

So I’m on reddit instead of doing my homework, and…
“Men of reddit: What are some common things expected of you on dates that you can’t stand? ”

Now, I’m expecting complaints about how women want men to 1. initiate everything and 2. pay for everything but I was NOT prepared for 3. they expect us to put out on the first date — wtf!

(I gotta admit, its hard not to pull the old “well at least you don’t have your period EVERY MONTH for YEARS and then your body goes poopoo once its finally over with” card.)

But petty sex-bashing and arguing over which gender/sex stereotype is worse… I kinda feel bad for them. I mean, yeah, it sucks EITHER way. :(

And wow, I’m not sure what kind of weird to call it, but guys complaining about being expected to put out because girls expect them to want put out so they expect certain behavior… wow. Ironic isn’t the word. But…wow o_O

[…] BDSM (possibly also for another post) and she has written about her early struggle to come and her realisation that coming is not her favourite part of sex. I encourage anyone and everyone to check out her posts about this journey – far more […]

My wife and I have been into orgasm denial and chastity for a few years. She has steadily reduced my orgasm and a few months ago asked me if I loved her enough to give up my orgasm for good. How could I say not when put that way. I knew for a long time that my wife would prefer that I never have an orgasm.

I get depressed for days after an orgasm and basically am a jerk to my wife for a few weeks. Neither of us like me after an orgasm so we decided to cut them out. I have been denied intercourse for about 30 of our 40 years of marriage. So I was not giving up much.

My wife is lucky. She can have an orgasm in 2-3 minutes and keep having them until she cannot take it anymore. She is the dream wife of a man with pre-ejaculation problems. We joke that she can cum from me just looking at her clitoris.

For us, orgasm denial had a lot of reasons. My wife is bi and not a penis fan. She thinks semen/ejaculation is disgusting. She does not get stimulated by intercourse and prefers to use a vibrator these days. I was down to 2-3 orgasms a year anyway and did not like having to start over again after each orgasm. I prefer to have a feeling of constant arousal than 10 secons of an orgasm.

What made my wife fall in love with orgasm denial is that for the first time in her life, she is not concerned with making sure I have an oragasm. She used to call sex without me having an orgasm, “fake” sex. Now she enjoys being the sole focus of our sex life. She had me buy a massage table because she loves massages. She prefers that I remain locked in my custom chastity device, all the time. She likes that it fits my flaccid penis like a glove and does not permit me to get an erection. When we were on the honor system, I would often get erections after a few months of denial and it did not take much to turn that into an orgasm.

I like not having to think of my orgasm anymore. I am content and feel energized all the time.

About Clarisse

On the other hand, I also wrote a different book about the subculture of men who trade tips on how to seduce and manipulate women:

I give great lectures on my favorite topics. I've spoken at a huge variety of places — academic institutions like the University of Chicago; new media conventions like South By Southwest; museums like the Museum of Sex; and lots of others.

I established myself by creating this blog. I don't update the blog much anymore, but you can still read my archives. My best writing is available in my books, anyway.

I've lived in Swaziland, Greece, Chicago, and a lot of other places. I've worked in game design, public health, bookstores, and digital journalism. Now I live in San Francisco; I make my living as a media strategist, editor, and writer.